Religion and Pollution = Death of Civilization

Religion is the greatest scourge in the history of mankind. It gave a group the right to kill, destroy and plunder in the name of God. Think :Joshuah, Belfast, Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch dunkings, Crusades, Jihadists, Joan of Arc, etc. It is worst if government power is behind any particular religion. Now, pollution has joined in the destruction of earth. Plastics choking fish at sea. Greenhouse gases melting icecaps and glaciers, causing the drowning of shores and islands. Civilization, as we know it, will end unless Atheists find ways to fight religion and pollution.

Equivocating the two is justifiable on some level. Religion is pollution. These belief systems pollute the purest, oldest beliefs about how we might be better as people with nonsense and it corrupts society. Don't we pollute the planet in the same way? Don't take our basic needs and overpopulate them with resources until we've ruined ourselves? So many of the blind faithful are blind wasteful. So many of the people that ruin people are people that ruin the world. Is it wrong to lump them together? Sure. But shooting a pedophile and having the round go through and hit a rapist isn't so bad.

The presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance or thing that has harmful or poisonous effects.

A lot of you have stated that pollution is completely unrelated to religion, and it is (unrelated) for the most part. I Googled it and could not find one church or religious organization that was pro-pollution or who was cited for causing a great amount of pollution. In fact, a lot of religious institutions seem to have anti-pollution programs for their local communities - and kudos to them for doing something right. But I can make a couple of good points, here, that involve both of these problems in relation to one another.

1) Okay, of all the things that SHOULD be in the bible, the proper care of our home is utterly missing. If there was really an omnipotent being out there somewhere who took the time to create all of this just for us, don't you think one of the first things that would/should be in his/her instruction manual/bible would be about how to keep our planet in proper working condition? Things like, oh - I don't know - "THOU SHALL NOT BURN UP ALL THE OIL IN THE EARTH" or maybe "THOU SHALL NOT ALLOW CORPORATE FARMING". But I have found no trace of any kind of warning about mistreating the earth, save for some vague statement about the 'destroyers of the earth' being punished (Revelation 11:18, King James Version: "And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth." - Whoa, heavy! LOL)

We are granted dominion and stewardship over the earth and we are told to go forth and replenish it, which implies that a certain amount of caretaking is demanded of us, but no actual knowledge as of how to do this is provided. We are simply handed the reins and told to run with them. To me, this is like setting an unsupervised 4 year old free in a toy store. Pollution will ensue, almost inevitably. For an all-knowing, all-caring "god" this would be highly irresponsible and shows not even a gleam of omnipotence; and this is just one of the holes in religion, as far as I am concerned. Over the years, "God" has proven to be more and more ignorant to the way our world actually works. So if there actually is a god, he/she/it knows almost nothing about his/her/its own creations and he/she/it is extremely irresponsible. Which brings me to my second point.

2) Religion is merely pollution of the mind and of the healthy consciousness of our race as a whole. It creates an unhealthy environment in which to be a human being. It pits us against each other for no reason other than to pit us against each other. It is a poison and a scourge on our planet. Sure, it is not a tangible form of pollution; one cannot get a shovel or a net and gather it all up for disposal - oh that we could! But it is a form of pollution that needs to be cleaned up somehow, someway. We have to keep fighting the good fight until the majority of our population wake up and realize that they have been scammed for millennia or two (or four) and come over to the good side.

Yet, here we are in 2012, and we still pollute our minds with wrong ideas. We use other people we deem more important than us (preachers, priests, rabbis, gurus, etc... etc... etc...) to confirm those wrong ideas, and then proceed to spread the disease to the rest of the world by making other people feel guilty and/or threatened by the prospect of not believing. I mean, if you have to use the threat of an imaginary lake of fire to get someone to believe something, a giant red flag should be automatically raised in the mind of your prospective believer. Anything worth your time should not include eternal punishment as a result of non-commitment. Anything worth your time WOULD NOT NEED such a threat. That more people cannot see this makes me extremely sad.

So, while religion and environmental pollution are really two separate issues, there are a few overlapping points. If you view religion AS a form of pollution, as I do, it's really easy to see their similarities. They are both things that we need to either completely eradicate or greatly reduce in order to have a peaceful, healthy planet. I would add a few more things to that list, like money and government, but that is an entirely different conversation.